World of Warcraft continues to be the most popular MMO on the market, and that’s despite losing over a million players this year. Other games have appeared carrying popular names including Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Warhammer Online. They didn’t do so great as subscription MMOs, so made the switch to a free-to-play model. That may still be working for some high-profile online games, but for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning the end is now in sight.

On December 18 the servers for Warhammer Online will be turned off after five years of service. At its peak the game counted 800,000 subscribers and 1.2 million copies sold, but less than a year after launch that number had dwindled below 300,000 subscribers and continued to fall. Switching to F2P gave the game a lifeline, but clearly only short term.

The decision to shut down the MMO came when it was time to sign a new agreement between Mythic and Games Workshop. Both companies decided not to continue the relationship, and therefore the game can no longer be offered to players. EA has already started taking action by turning off subscription auto renewals and removing three-month subscription codes. Hopefully some kind of world event will be held in December for the remaining players to experience before everything goes dark.

There won’t exactly be a lot for EA and Mythic to actually shut down on December 18. The initial 76 servers the game had at launch in 2008 were reduced to just 13 in 2009, with that total continuing to fall to just 3 by December 2011.